Iceland's Plan to Ban Porn Is Impossible

Iceland's intentions are good: their interior minister wants to
protect the country's children from violent images in porn.

But to understand the proposed ban — a sweep of online content
that "would define pornography as material with violent or
degrading content," rather than censor anything per
se, according
to the AP — is to understand that the Icelandic
government doesn't quite get the breadth of its undertaking.

So before you get all worked up about what "degrading" porn looks
like or make a free-speech argument, here's an outline of
Iceland's would-be policy, and why it might not work anyway:

Make it illegal to pay for porn with Icelandic credit
cards. That sounds effective in theory, but there
is a myriad of free streaming porn sites, and that wouldn't do
much about all of the people who download porn
illegally — the latter has plagued
the United States's porn industry.

Also, if someone is determined to pay for porn on the Internet,
there's certainly a way to pay for things without
an Icelandic credit card.

Make a list of banned sites without going all North
Korea. Not only would the government list be
completely subjective, it would also have to be constantly
updated by some kind of porn-hunter division.

But according
to CNN "Iceland has a population of 322,000 — roughly
the same as St. Louis, Missouri. That, and its remote location
1,300 miles off of the coast of Europe, would make jamming or
blocking Web traffic to certain sites easier, if that was the
route the government there chose."

Build a national Internet filter, maybe while going all
Iran. Again, this would be subjective and argued
relentlessly.

But a look at Iran's filtration of World of
Warcraft, which technically was banned in Iran — even
before Blizzard, the company which produces the
game, enforced
the U.S. sanctions on Iranian gamers in August — reveals
that you can't exactly stop users who want something so badly
they'll find a workaround.

"[T]housands usually access the game through VPNs, proxy servers
and other techie things that you probably don't know about unless
your every waking hour is consumed with slaying dragons in the
plains of Kalimdor," wrote Vice's
Henry Langston.

People are passionate about their porn, and there isn't even a
U.S. sanction against Iceland to help enforce the blockade. Not
nearly.